User Reviews

Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks: Part 1 starts as a Time Lord (John Frankly-Robbins) intercepts the Doctor (Tom Baker) while using the transmat beam, see the end of the previous story The Sontaran Experiment, & he ends up in a desolate war ravaged wasteland (appropiately it was shot in England) where the Time Lord says that sometime in the future the Daleks will wipe out all intelligent life in the galaxy & that he wants him to travel to the Daleks home planet of Skaro & either prevent their creation or alter their genetics so they are less aggressive, the Doctor has little choice but to agree. In no time he is joined by his companions Harry Sulivan (Ian Marter) & Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) & they find themselves in the middle of a war-zone, Harry & the Doctor are captured by the hostile Kaleds & mistaken for their enemies the Thals, meanwhile Sarah has to survive the dangers of the wastelands by herself...

This Doctor Who adventure was episode 11 from season 12 that aired here in the UK during early 1975 & was Tom Baker's fourth story, directed by David Maloney I thought this was a cracking episode to a great story. The script by Terry Nation goes right back to the creation of the Daleks as the Doctor is asked to alter history, quite a bit has already happened as this episode moves along at a fast pace. There's already been gun fights, explosions, Sarah has already got herself in trouble (women eh?), there's ugly mutants roaming around, the character's are good & the basic premise to Genesis of the Daleks is a intriguing one as it puts the Doctor in a moral dilemma, this is only Part 1 & I haven't seen the other five yet but I'm looking forward to after a great opener that has what all good Doctor Who stories do & above all is great fun & highly entertaining.

This one actually looks pretty good with decent production values, the gunfights look alright, the costumes aren't silly & Betchworth Quarry in Surrey in England where the location shots were filmed makes for a pretty convincing barren battleground. This marks the first appearance of Davros in the series but he only appears in the shadows at the end of this episode as part of the cliffhanger ending.

Genesis of the Daleks has had a terrific start & hopefully it will continue in the same way over the next five parts.

Slight Spoilers To All Six Episodes

By 1975 the Daleks were on their metaphorical last legs . people would always tune in to watch but if you take the time to look at the viewing figure you'll that audience figures drop quite sharply over the following weeks during a Dalek adventure and complacency had crept in to the Dalek stories the only real interest in watching Planet from 1973 and Death from 1974 is that they feature Daleks . Narrative wise there's no other reason to watch the stories Genesis is a watershed. Perhaps only the Tenth Planetis more radical since it introduced both the Cybermen and regeneration to the show

The young mind can fail to recognise greatness . It fails to notice things such as intelligent writing and compelling acting . I felt slightly disappointed seeing this in 1975 since I'd hoped for a story where the Daleks featured more prominently . The Daleks are peripheral characters and the storytelling revolves around their creator Davros . Michael Wisher is actor unknown outside of his DOCTOR WHO roles but for six weeks in the spring of 1975 he gave a performance worthy of an Oscar . It's shameful that great acting will always be overlooked by the likes of BAFTA etc but Wisher gives perhaps the compelling performance ever seen in the classic show . I can only think of Simon Rouse in Kinda that possibly tops Wisher tour de force = of any actor in the classic series . Apparently Wisher tracked down recordings of Hitler in order to perfect his voice and you can see that Davros is Hitlerite in his thinking and mannerism . It's a spellbinding performance for someone who face is hidden by make up and is effectively confined to a robotic wheelchair

Producer Hinchcliffe , script editor Holmes , director Maloney and writer Nation push the boundaries back as to what they can get away with for a perceived children's show broadcast at tea time . From the opening sequence where a patrol of soldiers are machine gunned in slow motion through to the Nazi allusions and imagery this is something more than a mere children's television and shows how NuWho is often crass and banal when it attempts to be " daring " which usually is composed of a throwaway sexual innuendo . Watch the sequence where the prisoners try to escape by climbing up the rocket gantry .There's almost a cruel and sadistic edge as they're shot down one by one . Amongst this is some of the most quotable dialogue ever heard in the classic series . Notice how much of it is reworked from the novels of Dostoevsky

There is school of thought that Genesis isn't the masterpiece that it's often hyped up to be . The criticism mainly revolves around the plot remains rather static and mainly involves the protagonists getting captured ,escaping then getting recaptured . This is my well be true but all the production values come together to make a breath taking , gritty , intelligent drama that any narrative flaws can be forgiven . There might be a couple of other DOCTOR WHO stories I consider to be my " favourites " , namely Silurians and Inferno , both from 1970 but if anyone asks what is the greatest Who story from 1963-89 I would say Genesis

Tho aired in '75, I would not see these programs and hadn't an ever-lovin' clue who Doctor Who was or had been, until 1980 or so, when it aired in the states. So beginning with Robot, to make matters more difficult, Sontaran Experiment and ARk In Space were aired out of sequence, making following the overall story of the Doctor, Harry and Sarah rather confusing.

And 'travelling' with the time ring or bracelet further left me with no idea what a Tardis or police call box might be.

With the first episode, we get endless Nazi comparisons with mutos, Thals and Kaleds.

At the end of this episode we first see Davros and I get my first glimpse of a Dalek. What on Earth? Silliest looking thing I had ever seen.

Likewise, this eccentric Doctor and Harry are taken captive, leaving Sarah Jane at the mercy of the mutos. Good luck, Sarah.

Genesis of the Daleks remains a fan favourite of the classic Dr Who series. It has Tom Baker brimming with energy in his first season, top companion Sarah-Jane Smith and - of course - the definitive Davros, played by Michael Wisher.

The main characters are ably supported by the minor players who take the whole thing seriously - as they should, as it's a dark storyline. A couple of stalwarts from the wartime comedy 'Allo 'Allo pop up in dramatic roles and do them very well. Some atmospheric location filming at the beginning adds to the mostly-studio-bound episodes.

Davros is played at his best here in any of his appearances in the classic series. Dedicated and single-minded with a lust for power and the possibility of immortality through his creations. Later stories just showed Davros as mad. Of course he is mad in this, but it is a controlled madness based upon logic.

Is Genesis perfect? Well no. At one point Davros plots the destruction of his own race by giving information to the Kaleds. Clearly there is no line of communication between his bunker and the Kaled city, or he could have messaged the information through on a secure line - and still have blamed Ronson and had the Daleks kill him as a traitor. Instead he actually visits the Thal city. Firstly - how did he get there? I doubt there was a train line. I can't see his chair traversing the wastelands (though I do accept he went a little into the wastelands to test his Dalek prototype - but presumably it was easy-access from the bunker). And why, when he is certain to be the most hated man known to the Thals, was he just not arrested on site? It's an important plot hole, but doesn't detract too much from the overall quality of the story.

I agree with what others have said - that it could have been a little shorter. Having said that there isn't as much obvious padding as other six parters. And some of the cliffhangers are very well staged - Sarah falling from the rocket scaffolding, for example.

Finally there is the big moral question posed by the Doctor - does he have the right to kill the Daleks? It is an argument well made between him and Sarah-Jane, who is urging him to complete his mission for the Time Lords. He is saved from making that choice at that point. However, later, the scene is weakened slightly by the Doctor then deciding to do it anyway - blow up the incubator room. Which he does - with help from a Dalek. He then says that he's only slowed them down for 1000 years. So - knowing that - why all the agony in the first place?

I really enjoy Genesis of the Daleks and - with a couple of small caveats mentioned above - I recommend it to any casual viewer or fan alike. It's darker than most 70's 'Who' but excellently played.

I'm still not sure how to review these Doctor Who serials. As a child I watched these on PBS and they were nicely edited into movie-form 90-120 minutes with no breaks. I'm really much more at home watching and reviewing the show in this form, but the new DVDs and IMDb listings insist on breaking everything up into pieces.

It's also a challenge for me to really view the show objectively through adult eyes, as my childhood was inextricably linked to this show. I overlook a lot of significant flaws and treasure every second of screen time, especially during the first few seasons of the Tom Baker years which to me were some of the best science fiction TV ever produced. Thank you Phil Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams so very much. Special credit goes to Tom Baker as well, whose performance as the Doctor could perfectly balance between dead seriousness and childish antics in a way no other actor could ever capture.

This episode is especially memorable from the era, and not at all because of the Daleks, strangely enough, but because we are thrown immediately into one of the best atmospheres any Doctor Who serial has set up. An apocalyptic planet over a thousand years into a war which has plunged both sides into World War One-style trench warfare. The very first image we see is a frightening vision of a gas-mask wearing soldier popping his head out from behind a boulder and ushering a squad of troopers to their doom in a misty, hellish landscape. Sure it's cheaply filmed in the same quarry Doctor Who would ritualistically reuse time and time again, but here to maximum effect.

Michael Wisher really lights up the screen as Davros, and the dialog (though largely written down for children to more easily understand) very rarely falters. We get an excellent sense for the villains' reasoning in creating the Daleks and the developing complex seemingly- symbiotic relationship between the seemingly helpless megalomaniac Davros and his aloof Himmler-like henchman Nyder makes things even more interesting. In order for a story to be great, it must have well-drawn villains.

Highlights include:

* The realization of the Thals and Kaleds to vaguely mirror the Allies and Axis, with both sides depicted as containing their share of honor and cruelty.

* Sarah bravely leading a group of slaves up some scaffolding to escape the Thal dome under a hail of gunfire. A riveting sequence hampered only by low budget.

* The dialog between the Doctor and Davros pertaining to a hypothetical virus which would exterminate all life. Wisher's delivery is something to behold. I'm sad he never escaped TV and stage acting.

* The Doctor's moral dilemma in making a decision to destroy the Daleks. As a child it annoyed me greatly to see any hesitation, but as an adult I see it as quite mind-opening.

So as you can see I'm quite partial to this series. It suffers from some plot holes, cheap sets, and gaps in logic, plus like "Frontier in Space" seems to have The Doctor and his companions incarcerated by one side or the other for the majority of the running time. However, the level of imagination on display makes up for it. This, along with "The Ark in Space", "The Pyramids of Mars", "The Seeds of Doom", "The Robots of Death", and "The Talons of Weng Chiang" is in my opinion one of the major high points of the show's 40+ year run.

I just watched this sick F*** of a story over the weekend. I've NEVER liked it, not since the first time I saw it in mid-1979. And I've seen it so many times since then, it's been permanently burned into my brain. From the moment I started my current run of watching my entire DOCTOR WHO collection, I've been dreading getting to this one. It's so nasty, vicious, brutal, violent, hopeless, downbeat, etc., it must be the single most unpleasant DW story to watch in the entire history of the show. The fact that it's won at least 2 completely unrelated fan polls for "best DW story ever" just shows there's a lot wrong with the world, and a lot of sci-fi fans in general (in my opinion).

GENESIS... always reminded me of a DW version of the "origin of Barnabas" from DARK SHADOWS. In both cases, time-travel is involved, and we get to look back at the events that led to the creation of something horrible. The difference is, on DS, it took 6 months to tell the story. On DW, 6 weeks. In both cases, you find yourself somehow desperately hoping that somehow, some way, things MIGHT change for the better... but they don't. They just get worse and worse and worse, right up to the horrible, inevitable ending.

I think there's only 2 likable characters in this entire story who don't get killed by the end-- Severn (the "muto") and Bettan (the slender girl with short red hair). This time around, it struck me that Bettan reminded me of what a very young Mary Morris might have looked like. (I've long suspected she must have been a really hot number when she was young.)

I seem to recall not long ago someone suggesting that this story may have featured DW's first gay couple. How else might one "explain" the actions of Nyder in reference to Davros, who "never makes mistakes". (Would he have changed his tune had he been able to see the story's final 5 minutes in advance??) Nyder is probably Peter Miles' most memorable character, and yet compared to the 2 scientists he played earlier (in THE SILURIANS and INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS), Nyder is actually rather low-key-- while at the same time being 10 times more dangerous.

Something that crossed my mind this time was, The Doctor convinces the dissidents within the Kaled government to look into Davros' experiments-- which, according to Davros' plans, will mean the destruction of the Kaled people, replacing them with Daleks! Had The Doctor not done this, would Davros have destroyed the Kaled city the way he did, or would he merely have done it later, anyway?

I have to wonder about someone like Gharman. Did he-- or anybody at all-- in the bunker-- have a clue that Davros was the one responsible for the destruction of the Kaled city?? Right to the very end, he and the rebelling faction continue their wish to work WITH Davros to rebuild the planet. Doesn't it seem that if they had known (and if they didn't, WHY didn't The Doctor TELL them??) they would have EXECUTED the guy on the spot, as soon as they got their hands on automatic weapons and had him in their sites? But at the very end, Gharman finally says-- "Davros, you are INSANE!" What the HELL took him so long to figure this out? A minute later, he and nearly everyone else in the room were dead.

I'm also reminded that in at least one later story, The Time Lords were said to have imprisoned an entire planet that was a menace to the universe in a time loop. Are we to believe that there was some reason they were unable to this with Skaro? Not really doing their "job" of protecting the universe, are they? After all these years, there is still endless details about Time Lord society and history that we're in the dark about. One thing seems clear from this story. Thanks to the Time Lords sending The Doctor to Skaro, Davros learned of his existence-- and that of his people. This single failed incident was probably what led, in the long run, to the "Time War" talked about so much on the new series that was responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords themselves.

There's no doubt Davros was Michael Wisher's most memorable part, having previously done Dalek voices in several serials. These days, I much prefer him as the corrupt bureaucrat in CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS. It's a tragedy that schedule conflicts prevented him from returning in the 4 sequels. NOBODY should have ever played Davros but him!

After this, I can look forward to watching the rest of my DW collection with relief, safe in the knowledge that there is virtually nothing this unpleasant awaiting me for the remainder of the run. The only stories even vaguely this nasty to sit thru would have to be WARRIORS OF THE DEEP, Resurrection OF THE DALEKS, THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI, ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN, VENGEANCE ON VAROS, TIMELASH, and MINDWARP. Note that these were all done under story editor Eric Saward, who seemed to revel in excessive nastiness, violence, and wholesale slaughter.

We are sometimes told that the Time Lords have a strict law forbidding them from interfering in the affairs of other planets, and the Doctor has at times found himself in trouble with his own race for breaking this law. So what are we to make of "Genesis of the Daleks" in which the Doctor is ordered by the Time Lords to travel back in time to prevent the creation of the Daleks? It would appear that the supposed "law" can be broken with impunity if the scriptwriter feels that to do so would make for a more interesting storyline.

In the "The Daleks", the second-ever "Doctor Who" serial, we learned that the planet Skaro was in the distant past devastated by a nuclear and chemical war between the Thals and the ancestors of the Daleks. In this serial we learn something of that war and of how it ended. It is often said that writer Terry Nation intentionally modelled the Daleks on the Nazis, and this serial makes the analogy more explicit. At this period the Kaleds, the predecessors of the Daleks, were still a humanoid race, ruled by a fascist dictatorship. (You can tell they're fascists because they wear black uniforms, give open-hand salutes and are obsessed with racial purity). They have an obsessive hatred of the Thals, from whom they are visually indistinguishable. Not that the Thals, at this point in history, were any less fanatical and ruthless than the Kaleds. (The Thals' olive-green uniforms may have been intended to suggest Stalin's Russia).

The Daleks may have been Nation's creation, but in the context of the series they were invented by an evil Kaled scientist named Davros who wanted to create a protective armour and travelling vehicle for what he believed the Kaleds would eventually evolve into. (This scenario does not make much sense scientifically; one cannot predict the future course of evolution unless one can predict what environmental conditions will be on the planet over a timeline of millions of years, and the idea of evolution producing a creature so maladapted to its environment that it needs a protective suit in order to survive makes no sense at all). Nation was not, however, the first sci-fi writer to play around with the concept of evolution for entertainment purposes. The basic idea of the Daleks is supported by the Kaled elite, but Davros also intends his creations to be totally devoid of pity, compassion or morality. This is too much for even a bunch of fascist dictators to stomach, and some of the leading Kaleds are therefore willing to cooperate with the Doctor against Davros.

This serial formed part of the programme's twelfth season and the Doctor therefore has, in addition to his regular female companion Sarah Jane Smith, a male one, Harry Sullivan, who only appeared in this season and the first serial of the thirteenth. It appears that the Fourth Doctor was originally envisaged as an elderly man similar to William Hartnell's First, so it was felt a younger man would be needed to handle the action sequences, but when the relatively youthful Tom Baker was cast Ian Marter was left with little to do.

"Doctor Who" adventures normally end with the Doctor triumphing over his enemies and foiling their schemes; even if he sacrifices his own life to do so we know that he will be reincarnated in a new body. Here, however, his mission ends in failure, as we have known from the beginning that it would. If he had succeeded in preventing the birth of the Daleks, this would have made nonsense of all those earlier serials in which they appear, and it would have prevented the BBC from using his most iconic adversaries in future episodes. Moreover, the Doctor is not so much defeated by the power of the Daleks or by the cunning of Davros; he is defeated by his own moral weakness when he fails to take an opportunity to destroy the entire Dalek race once and for all.

Alternatively, it could be argued that the Doctor is defeated by his own moral strength rather than weakness. By refusing this opportunity he shows that he is himself capable of mercy and pity and is not prepared to descend to the same moral level as his enemies. The Doctor is, of course, quite prepared to kill individual Daleks if necessary in self- defence, but in his view genocide, even if committed in what could be regarded as self-defence, is qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, different from killing. It seems to me that Nation was deliberately introducing an element of moral ambiguity into "Genesis of the Daleks"; do we applaud the Doctor for his act of mercy; or do we simply regard him as a "catastrophically incompetent secret agent", as one reviewer described him? I suspect that every viewer will have his or her own answer to this question.

The serial does not address some of the paradoxes of time travel, such as "what would happen if the Doctor's actions in the past give rise to a future in which he does not exist?", or even "why didn't the Time Lords, once they realised the Doctor had failed, send another, more ruthless, agent back to destroy the Daleks?" Nation's readiness to explore moral issues, however, combined with some excellent dialogue and the skillful use of cliff-hangers to create an exciting story, make "Genesis of the Daleks" one of the most memorable "Doctor Who" serials.